Weaving Back to Common Grounds
by otc
FRI 07.11. – SUN 07.12.2025
Exhibition Opening: 07.11.2025, 6 pm
Talk & Publication Release: 14.11.2025, 6 pm
Weaving Back to Common Grounds marks the final stage of the two-year project Have We Passed Peak Collective, developed in collaboration with Künstler:innenhaus Lauenburg and other institutions. The project has explored questions of collective practice, shared agency, and collaboration in times of social and cultural change, reflecting on the dynamics between individual and collective work and the conditions that make collaboration possible or strenuous.
Common ground can be difficult to locate. It requires negotiation, reflection, and the ability to move between different perspectives - sometimes facing conflicting realities. It can mean navigating distance as much as proximity, moments of comfort as well as friction.
Finding common ground is part of every collective process. Different threads are taken up and woven together - a structure that is never seamless, full of gaps and loose ends. It means navigating emotions as much as ideas: moments of frustration, care, hesitation, and trust that shape how people work and relate. Collective work is labour, but it is also a form of grounding, a way to stay connected when certainties fall away. In a society marked by division and hyper-individualism, the question of what can still be shared feels increasingly urgent.
The exhibition reflects on the processes of finding - and losing - common ground. It examines closeness and distance, change and transformation, acknowledging that what once connected can later become a site of rupture.
The works on view - both collaborative and individual - approach these questions through overlaps, exchanges, and shifting boundaries. They trace how proximity and distance, both spatial and emotional, shape artistic practice and collective experience. Some works emerge from shared research and conversation; others stand apart, maintaining a tension between independence and interdependence. Together they form a field of relations - unstable, negotiated, and open-ended.
A publication accompanying the exhibition expands on these ideas, gathering voices and reflections from the project’s two-year trajectory as well as offering ideas and tools to both collectives and institutions.
On 14.11.2025, a talk with invited guests will address collective work within the art world as well as contexts of social and political change.
This exhibition has been made possible with the support of Stiftung Kunstfonds, the State of Schleswig-Holstein, Künstler:innenhaus Lauenburg Fellowship Program, and the Künstler:innenhaus Lauenburg City Gallery.